In Nicula you do not paint an icon. You write it — God cannot be drawn, only written again. The tradition ended with my great-grandfather, Clopotarul, the Bellringer, the last to write icons on glass in the village. These works continue it rather than preserve it: paintings that keep the “clumsiness” the Nicula icons were scolded for — the free-drawn line that carries the painter’s heartbeat, closer to life than any ruled one — and turn the inherited holy images with a quiet, disruptive queerness. Where medical seeing moves outside in, the icon moves inside out: the saint carried whole to the surface, the body held rather than opened.
